Late evening and night yesterday on Sunday 13.03. the outskirts of
Donetsk city were under intense attacks by the Ukrainian troops, as were
the most remarkable sectors at the same time: the Airport, Spartak and
the Yasinovataya crossroads. The DONi News team recorded sounds from
battles close to the frontline for you to understand the real gravity of
the situation in the DPR defense lines today.

We positioned our car just behind the Spartak village which has constantly been under
Ukrainian shelling and attacks especially in recent months. From our
observing position we could cover three of the main sectors - Spartak,
the Donetsk Airport on our left and the Yasinovataya crossroads on our
right side. All these three sectors were under attack at the same time
between 22:00 and 23:00 local time, when we were doing our observations
and we also confirm this by checking the situation in each
sector closer.

In this audio-video clip there are two tapes from the situation and
how it can be heard in the middle of darkness. We have to remember that
in front of us, a few hundred meters from the position where these tapes
are recorded, there are approximately 800 civilians, women and
children, still living in horrible conditions. They stay in cellars
and bomb shelters in the middle of the shelling and under fire from
automatic weapons.

DONi News will keep closely covering situations in hotspots, and the
military intelligence sources are telling us that Ukraine keeps sending
heavy artillery and rocket launchers to further escalate the situation. We can already hear them shelling, day and night, outskirts of the DPR capital. Since the beginning of March the general situation has been worsening day by day, and surely this was the first time we could observe three frontline sectors in defensive battles simultaneously.

The
survey, which was only one question: "Who would you vote for in the
elections to the Duma?", The site was attended by 2 thousand 487
respondents - it is even more than in the standard opinion polls, which
are conducted by VTsIOM, but naturally. it does not take into account the sociological sample.On the leading place was the Communist Party, which received 44.4% of the votes polled.Remained in second place, "United Russia" won only 8%, while the other parties have failed to overcome the 5% barrier. 4.7% received "Falcons Zhirinovsky" further ahead "Socialist", located "Homeland" with 3.9%. Same result - by 3.6% scored "Fair Russia" and "RPR-Parnas", 0.1% of them are behind "The Communists of Russia".As
for the other parties with an opportunity to participate in the
elections to the State Duma without collecting signatures, the "Apple"
has collected 1.8% of the vote, "party of pensioners" - 1.1%, "Patriots
of Russia" - 1%. "Just Cause", "Civic Platform", "Green" and "Civil Force" were the result of lower than 1%.

Trump repeated—favorably—an apparent myth
about how General John Pershing summarily executed dozens of Muslim
prisoners in the Philippines with tainted ammunition during a guerrilla
war against the occupying United States. “He took fifty bullets, and he
dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his
rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those
people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and
you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem,
okay?” …

The moral of the tale, according to Trump: “We better
start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better
start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”

Sarlin notes that the tale of General Pershing’s mass execution of 49 Muslims has been widely discredited
by the website Snopes, which gathered historical records of his tour of
duty in the Philippines, a cluster of islands in the western Pacific
Ocean that were ruled by the United States in the first half of the 20th
century. The false anecdote apparently arose from Pershing’s
involvement in the Moro Rebellion, a fourteen-year conflict between the Moros, an indigenous Muslim group in the southern Philippines, and the U.S. military.

The most unsettling thing about Trump’s aside isn’t that it’s false,
though. It’s that he’s indulging an openly racist murder fantasy—in
which an American military officer uses dead Muslims he had killed with
bullets dipped in the blood of swine (an animal whose meat and other
byproducts are considered impure, and thus forbidden from consumption,
by the Qur’an) to terrorize many more Muslims—in order to convince South
Carolinians to vote for him.

Presidential candidates are certainly not immune to promulgating fake Internet memes. Nor has Trump been friendly to Muslims, either: In the past few months alone, he’s endorsed preventing Muslims from entering the United States, shuttering a certain number of mosques (while placing the remainder under surveillance), and registering
every practicing Muslim in a national database. In that sense, today’s
utterance differed in degree, not kind: Trump will say anything, for any
reason, if it benefits him. At the same time, this tale gives us a good
sense of what kind of person Trump is pandering to, and what exactly
such a person would believe.

The PKK is labeled as a ‘terrorist organization’ by the United Nations, the European Union and Turkey. The PKK started their armed struggle in the 1980’s and they fight for the rights of the Kurdish people. Turkey is a member of the NATO and that is why the world turns a blind eye on what is really happening in Turkey and occupied North-Kurdistan (East-Turkey).

The Kurds are not allowed to be educated in their own language. Kurdish children are forced to sing ‘He is proud to calm himself a Turk’ and have to sing the Turkish national anthem. East-Turkey is kept poor and the Kurds live in bad conditions.

The Turkish government didn’t recognize the Kurdish identity for decades, they labeled the Kurds as ‘mountain Turks’. The Turkish army destroyed more than 3,500 Kurdish villages and killed tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians, the most recent genocide against the Kurdish nation by the Turkish Government was in 2011, during the Roboski Massacre. More than 35 Kurdish children were killed. Turkey didn’t apologize to their families and their explanation was: ‘We thought they were PKK terrorists.’

You will see the the true face of the Turkish nation and the Turkish government in this video. Kurdish civilians are tortured and murdered.

(The video has since been removed from youtube, but is available in the link provided)

02:20 – A
Kurdish kid is trying to awaken his mother. His mother was seriously
injured (and probably murdered) during a demonstration. As you can see,
his mother does not respond and everyone else is busy taking care of
their family members.

03:15 – Bodies are dragged away by the fascist Turkish police.

03:20 – Three ”brave” Turkish police men are dragging a 10 years old Kurdish kid away. They must feel really though!

03:30 – More than 20 Turkish soldiers and police men are kicking one Kurdish protester.

03:43 – A Turkish police officer breaks the arm of a young Kurdish boy.

There is more. Watch it for yourself. This is how the Turkish government is treati

ng the Kurds
and this is why the PKK fights against the terrorist Turkish
government. Don’t let them brainwash you. Think for yourself! The Kurds
have been treated worse than this. Not only by the Turks, but also by
the Arabs and Persians. More than 182,000 Kurds were buried alive in the
late 1980’s by the Ba’ath regime of Saddam Hussein.

Turkey is
supporting Palestinian terrorists, Islamic Terrorists, the terrorists of
FSA in Syria, they say that the Taliban are freedom fighters. But
according to these hypocrites, these fascists, the PKK, which is a
socialist atheist movement (half of the PKK fighters are women), is a
terrorist organization.

The Turkish state is the true terrorist!

Turkey Kills 40 Kurdish Civilians – Kurdish Response

Turkey massacred 40 Kurdish civilians, including 19 children. There excuse for this massacre was ”they mistook them for terrorists”. The children were smuggling small cigarette packages from ‘Iraq’ (South-Kurdistan) to ‘Turkey’ (North-Kurdistan) to help support their family.

Kurds in South-Eastern Turkey (North-Kurdistan) are treated as second class citizens. They are not allowed to give their children Kurdish names, they are not allowed to be thought the Kurdish language, they are forced to swear loyalty to the Turkish flag and call themselves ‘Turkish’ rather than ‘Kurdish’. The Kurdish areas are extremely underdeveloped and kept poor. The Turkish government steals all the natural resources in South-Eastern Turkey (Kurdish inhabited areas), to develop the Turkish (touristic) areas. The Kurds do not benefit from this.

The PKK took up arms to fight against this oppression and discrimination. Turkey, the United States and the European Union label the PKK as a ‘terrorist organization’. The PKK consists of 5,000 men – 2,500 of them are women fighters. The PKK does not only fight for equal rights for the Kurds, but also for equal rights for women and all other minorities in Turkey. They target the Turkish military and politicians, while the Turkish government has committed many massacres throughout history (Dersim Massacre, Armenian Genocide are only 2 of those massacres). Yet the USA & EU label the PKK as a terrorist organization, just to please their Turkish ally.

Please spread this video so people know more about the Kurdish issue in Turkey. People need to know about the Turkish oppression and discrimination of Kurds.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday begins a two-day visit to Paris. Rouhani in the French capital will come from Italy, where he met with
the president and prime minister, and had a meeting with Pope Francis in
Vatican.Rowhani's visit to France was originally scheduled for November 16-18,
2015, but then was postponed due to a series of terrorist attacks that
shook Paris on 13 November killed more than 130 people.Iran
January 16 got rid of most of the sanctions imposed on the country -
the day of the IAEA submitted a report confirming the readiness of the
authorities to implement the country created for her by long
negotiations on the program a significant reduction of its nuclear
potential. Later, the EU and US have confirmed Iran's withdrawal from the economic and financial sanctions related to its nuclear program.Removing sanctions against Iran, in particular, to reopen the
country's access to the international banking system, which will allow
Iran to buy abroad previously unavailable goods - such as airplanes,
automobiles, industrial equipment and medicines.During
Rouhani's visit to Italy on January 25-26, the country has signed a
number of trade agreements for a total amount of 15 to 17 billion euros,
including the construction of the pipeline. It is expected that during the Paris of the European trip Rowhani also signed several important business agreements for Iran.The program of the visitThe first day of the visit will be devoted to meetings with representatives Rouhani French business circles. First, the Iranian leader will meet with 20 representatives of the
Medef, the French Association of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.Participation in this event will also French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Besides this, Rowhani will meet tete-a-tete with the heads of Airbus and Total.It is expected that during the visit of Rouhani in Paris to sign an
agreement between the two companies and Iran Air Airbus on the purchase
of 114 aircraft.According
to the source agency Sputnik in the airline Iran Air, supply 114
passenger planes from Airbus to Iran will be fully completed by the end
of June. On Sunday, Iran announced that it intends to purchase all in Europe more than 160 aircraft.Another
significant event during the visit to Paris Rowhani, experts say, will
sign an agreement to launch a joint project automotive group PSA Peugeot
and the Iranian car manufacturer Khodro. Investments of each of the parties are estimated at hundreds of millions of euros.Willingness to return to the Iranian market also expressed another
French automaker Renault, which has stopped its own production in Iran
in 2013, but considers this country a strategic market for himself and
hopes to re-sign the agreement on the localization of production in Iran
of its new models.In
the second day of his visit, the Iranian leader to visit the Elysee
Palace, where he will meet with French President Francois Hollande. During the meeting, it is also expected to sign a number of
agreements, which will initiate a new era of relations between the two
countries after the lifting of sanctions against Iran.In
addition, according to some media reports, on Thursday may also signed
an agreement on the development of three Iranian airports: of Bouygues,
ADP pretend to get the joint contract for the development of the airport
in Tehran, and the company Vinci - two other airports, including
Mashhad.

Europe’s reaction to the recent influx of refugees does not bode well
for the future of liberal democracy in a world where climate change will
force far more people to migrate. Across the continent xenophobic,
right-wing populist parties are on the rise while even mainstream parties are pushing policies of aggressive policing, surveillance, and militarized borders.

Projecting climate-driven displacement forward with any accuracy is
tricky. Estimates of how many people might be on the move, when, and
under which emissions scenarios vary widely.

The Stern Review
in 2006 cited estimates that climate change, by unleashing rising sea
levels, more frequent floods, and more intense droughts, could displace
150 to 200 million people by the middle of the century. A year later,
the NGO Christian Aid predicted
that, “on current trends, a further 1 billion people will be forced
from their homes between now and 2050.” The United Nations Development
Programme’s 2007–8 Human Development Report estimated 330 million people will be displaced if there are global temperature increases of 3 to 4°C.

Regardless of which estimate one chooses, this much is clear: if
robust emissions reductions do not begin immediately climate change
promises to displace unprecedented numbers of people throughout the rest
of this century. While climate change is a contributing, though not
central, factor driving the current wave of refugees, climate change
should be the center of discussions now, because policy choices today
set the stage for policies in a warmer and less stable future.

The current migration wave out of the Middle East and Africa toward
the European Union (EU) began in 2011, but accelerated dramatically last
year when more than a million people entered the EU, most of them
settling in Germany.

Between 2007 and 2013, the EU allocated €4 billion to deal with refugees but, according to Amnesty International,
only 17 percent of that amount was spent “to support asylum procedures,
reception services and the resettlement and integration of refugees.”
The other 83 percent was spent on border militarization, detention,
surveillance, and deportation.

Undergirding this European state hardening is the idea of an
“emergency.” The EU held an emergency summit on refugees; the European
Commission Emergency Response Coordination Centre is managing the flow
of expertise and material. The United Nations and international NGOs
have all launched emergency appeals.
Politicians of the far right conflate migration and terrorism and
frame the supposed emergency as a civilizational conflict. Geert
Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, said this:
“It’s an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our
culture, and identity.” The political center has not been much better.
Czech president and social democrat Milos Zeman said: “I am profoundly convinced that we are facing an organized invasion and not a spontaneous movement of refugees.”

In France, where migration and terrorism are increasingly tangled in
the public mind, Socialist president Françoise Hollande has declared
“war against terrorism,” while parliament unanimously imposed a sweeping
state of emergency,
giving police almost unlimited powers to search and arrest. From Sweden
to Macedonia, states have imposed “emergency” border controls. In the
east, this means building heavily militarized and very permanent border
fences. And the EU is creating a new supranational border-policing
agency.
The current influx of refugees to Europe does not, in any economic or
cultural sense, constitute an “emergency.” The (non-EU) foreign-born
population of Europe is about 6.3 percent. By comparison, 13 percent of
the United States population is foreign-born.

There is no clear economic case for the alarmism in Europe.
Economists, after all, largely agree that immigration has been an
important source of US economic growth over the last fifty years. New
migrants could solve one of the demographic problems of a rapidly
graying Europe. The EU average “fertility rate” is about 1.6 per
childbearing woman, but it needs to be 2 just to maintain current
population levels.
This is a normal pattern in developed economies — when women have
social and economic options and families don’t need child labor, family
size decreases. But the pattern becomes problematic as lifespans extend.
For society to maintain a dependent aging population, it needs a
youthful workforce. Western Europe has found a solution: drain off
talent from Eastern Europe. But in Eastern Europe the population is
aging and shrinking, and the educated youth are leaving.

The contradictions of neoliberalism have meant that in Eastern Europe
there are simultaneously high levels of unemployment and real shortages
in the construction, manufacturing, health care, and technology
sectors. One survey found 40 percent of firms in Poland were unable to
fill vacancies. In Hungary it was even higher. Further west employers
still struggled but reported fewer difficulties: 18 percent of Czech
firms and 28 percent among Slovakian firms.

Austerity and privatization have facilitated this situation by
preventing the broad social investment necessary to develop the talents
of all citizens, even as a new class of skilled workers and
professionals is siphoned off to the west. Left behind amid the
deindustrialized post-socialist rustbelt are pools of increasingly
unemployed, undereducated youth and frightened pensioners. It’s fertile
ground for xenophobic populist reaction.

Emergency in Theory and Practice

Political theory has long noted the dangerous legal and constitutional
implications of “emergencies” and the “state of exception.” The
far-right German legal theorist Carl Schmitt
used the idea of the “state of emergency” — a constitutional suspension
of the constitution — to theorize a legal basis for Nazi dictatorship.
In his argument, which can also be inverted and read as a critique,
emergencies are the means by which democracies legally smuggle in
authoritarian, or absolutist, politics and law enforcement.

Just after Hitler was offered power by German president Hindenburg,
the new chancellor issued the “Decree for the Protection of the People
and the State” after the Reichstag fire. The law restricted the right to
assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and allowed police
to arrest and incarcerate people without specific charges and to ban and
dissolve publications and organizations at will. Legally speaking, the
Third Reich was a twelve-year long state of emergency under the Weimar
Constitution.

Political theorist Giorgio Agamben, close reader and left interpreter of Schmidt, argues
that “the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though
perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the
essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called
democratic ones.” Agamben, who refuses to be fingerprinted, argues that
the combination of advanced technologies of social control, politics of
fear, and profound erosion of democratic rights are fundamentally
transforming the relationship between states and populations, turning
citizens into essentially subjects without rights, detainees in waiting.

Climate change will bring actual emergencies: flooded cities,
disrupted trade, food price shocks, and truly massive migrations. If the
specter of emergency is already being invoked today, we can only
imagine what the response to come will be like.

How The Exodus Began

Just beyond Europe’s borders there are now 9 million refugees in the
Middle East and another 15 million in sub-Saharan Africa. Roughly 1
million of these people reached the EU during 2015, and about 3,700 died
on the way, usually drowning in the Mediterranean. Three majority
Muslim countries host roughly 30 percent of the world’s refugees; two of
these are at the edge of Europe, Turkey, and Lebanon, and the third is
Pakistan.

Since 2011 the number of refugees globally has surged by a shocking
40 percent, bringing the worldwide total to 60 million refugees, more
than any time since World War II.

Why the upward spike starting in 2011? That year saw the second major
food price shock in less than a decade. Between June 2010 and June
2011, world grain prices almost doubled. Wheat prices shot up 83
percent, while corn prices increased by a staggering 91 percent.

In summer 2010, Russia, one of the world’s leading wheat exporters,
suffered its worst drought in one hundred years. Known as the Black Sea
Drought, this extreme weather pattern triggered fires that burnt vast
swathes of Russian forest and desiccated farmland in Russia, Ukraine,
and Kazakhstan. That year, Russian wheat exports declined by 78 percent.

Meanwhile, bad weather in the American Midwest in
2009 and 2010 meant wheat production shortfalls, and by 2011 that
translated into a 22 percent drop in US wheat exports. Over the same
years, massive flooding in Pakistan put a large part of that country
under water, and while this did not hurt wheat exports as much as
expected, it rattled markets and spurred on the speculators.

Among those most aggressively bidding up grain prices was the
Swiss-based commodities trading giant Glencore. The firm went so far as
to publicly urge Russia to cancel its export contracts, which it did.
Egypt, like many Middle Eastern countries, is a major wheat importer,
one of the single biggest in the world. When Russia canceled its export
contracts, food prices in Egypt and across the Maghreb surged, helping
fuel the protests that became the Arab Spring.
Meanwhile, modern bread riots broke out in cities from Bishkek,
Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and four new wars began: Libya, Yemen,
Syria, and a small one in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

At the same time drought in Syria, combined with austerity by the
Assad government, pushed as many as eight hundred thousand Sunni farmers
off the land and into cities. Their suffering and the associated social
friction contributed to the outbreak of civil war in Syria.

The other driving factor behind the 2011 refugee spike is far more
self-evident: NATO aggression. Among the top sending countries in the
European refugee crisis are places that NATO forces have bombed. In
particular the top three are Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Libya, also
bombed by NATO, is a major jump-off point for migrants from further
south.

ISIS is a political formation born
directly out of the regional crisis created by the US invasion of Iraq.
The current ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is even a veteran of the
US detention center at Camp Bucca.
As the ultimate expression of blowback, ISIS’s methods reflect its
origins; the group has built a strategy around chaos and emergency. The
logic was laid out by ISIS’s precursor organization, al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia, in a 2004 manifesto called “The Management of Savagery.”

ISIS seeks to fill power vacuums, create more of them, and use fear
of chaos. Their terror attacks in the West — described in the text as
“vexation operations” — attempt to provoke despotic over-reactions from
otherwise relatively liberal governments, which will criminalize all
Muslims, harden and close open societies, and drive alienated Muslims
into the arms of the self-described caliphate.

The Paris attacks of November 13 were ISIS’s ideological intervention
into the European refugee crisis. Those attacks at a café, a nightclub,
and outside the Stade de France (where Hollande was watching a game)
were cheap, low-tech, but spectacularly horrific — and they provoked a
massive and ugly reaction. A possibly doctored Syrian passport found
near one Paris attack site was all that the European far right needed to
conflate refugees and terrorism.

Europe’s Self-Mutilation

Thus far Europe’s reaction has mostly fit the ISIS plan: a state of
emergency in France, rising xenophobic rhetoric, and a campaign of
aggressive border militarization. Admittedly, hopeful counter examples
also exist: thousands of rank-and-file citizens have mobilized to assist
migrants; Germany’s Angela Merkel initially sidestepped conventions to
usher in thousands of stranded refugees. But official xenophobia, rather
than hospitality, appears to be leading.

Consider the French state of emergency. The French government banned a series of public demonstrations and has allowed police to launch
warrantless searches requiring some administrative oversight but no
judicial approval. When police find electronic equipment, like phones
and laptops, they can copy all of the information.

The emergency law allows the state to place people who haven’t been
tried or convicted under house arrest. All that’s needed is for police
officials to deem a person’s behavior, including her associations and
statements, “a threat to security or public order.” House arrest can
last as long as police have “serious reason” to think a person’s conduct
“threatens security or the public order.”

Police can also force un-tried and un-convicted people who they deem
too radical to wear electronic tagging bracelets. The state can dissolve
organizations and associations considered threats to public order.
Members of these groups can be placed under house arrest. Violations of
house arrests can lead to three years in prison. Violations of traffic
bans or security zones can get a person six months in prison plus heavy
fines.
France’s minister of interior may take “any measure” to block
websites and social networks that are “inciting or glorifying terrorist
attacks” immediately and without judicial control. People targeted by
the police — put under house arrest, for example, or abused in the
course of searches — have no right to challenge authorities or request
the removal of emergency measures.

Shortly after the November attacks, the country established border
controls at 132 checkpoints, increased its counterterrorism resources,
and hired 9,500 more cops, judicial officers, and customs officials, and
deployed 10,000 soldiers to support the 100,000 police and gendarmes
already patrolling French streets.
As if that weren’t enough, now Hollande has proposed
a constitutional amendment to make most of the state of emergency
permanent. The amendment would also strip French citizenship from dual
nationals convicted of terrorism offenses (even those born in France),
criminalize visits to jihadist websites, and close radical mosques.

All of this justified in the name of fighting religious terrorism,
yet who were some of the first people put under house arrest? Climate
activists organizing protests to coincide with the COP21 meetings in
Paris.
Democracy in France has taken a body blow. The ghost of Carl Schmitt
smiles, and Giorgio Agamben’s overly abstract prose reads as prophecy.

Populist Right and Border Building

And what has Hollande’s outflanking of the xenophobic right won him?
Nothing. During round one of the regional elections, held on December 6,
the far-right National Front (FN) came in first,
with almost 28 percent of the vote. The only thing that kept the FN
from taking control of up to six regions was Hollande’s panicked order
that his Socialist Party candidates withdraw from the second round,
clearing the way for Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans.

In European countries that have not been attacked, the refugee influx
is the “emergency” used to justify repression. Immigrants are cast as
invaders.

For twenty years the European populist right has been gaining ground, and now they are near or at the top of the polls in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and France. This is their moment, and border militarization is one of their primary methods.

The post–Cold War re-walling of Europe began in 2011 as the flow of
refugees fleeing NATO bombs, jihadists, and failed and failing states
began to surge. That year Greece began militarizing land-traversing
portions of the Greek–Turkish border that do not follow the course of
the Maritsa river. The Greek barrier is a double line of
fifteen-foot-high, razor-wire-topped fencing; between the two fence
lines are piled more coils of razor wire. Four-story watchtowers and
thermal vision cameras look down upon the line. But Greece is an
archipelago and series of peninsulas; it cannot be fenced off. And so,
the migrants press in.
When the flow of refugees began to accelerate in 2015, aggressive
border building broke out elsewhere across Europe. Hungary’s right-wing
nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, led the way.

In 2014, as Hungary was facing economic crisis and seeking a €20
billion bailout and Orban was advocating nationalism and economic
protectionism and attacking the EU as bullying overlords, the country
was also becoming a major recipient or transit route for refugee flows.
But a survey found that only 3 percent of Hungarians identified
immigration as a top issue of concern. Instead, unemployment and general
economic worries were at the forefront of their minds.

But Orban changed all that in spring 2015 when he declared his
preference for an “illiberal state,” and then in late July sent prison
laborers, soldiers, and jobless men in workfare programs to build a
chain-link and razor-wire fence along the southern border with Serbia
and Croatia. By August, Orban had ordered helicopters, mounted police, and dogs to patrol the line.

On September 15, Hungary closed its borders with Serbia (a month later it would shut
the border with Croatia), and then it began mass arrests of migrants
trying to sneak across. Tent cities formed on the Serbian side. As the
stranded travelers chanted “UN” and “help us” and “Open! Open! Open!”
Hungarian police answered with tear gas. Serbia angrily condemned
Hungary for firing tear gas into another sovereign state. Other trapped
migrants protested by sewing their lips shut, while in Romania, Prime
Minister Victor Ponta lamented: “Fences, dogs, cops and guns — this
looks like Europe in the 1930s.”

Globally, the liberal intelligentsia condemned Orban. But at home,
his popularity surged. Soon it seemed that every other national leader
east of Rome, Paris, and Berlin was building fences. Slovenia and
Austria started fences. Even little Macedonia, using materials provided
by Hungary, is building a militarized barrier on its border with Greece.

Bulgaria has also begun constructing a militarized border facing
south towards Turkey. Journalist and NGOs now regularly document reports
of Bulgarian border security beating, robbing, and unleashing dogs on
migrants. The unlucky, uncounted thousands fall back into Greece and
Turkey, where they remain stranded and hungry. Further away, on the
Jordanian border, twelve thousand camp.

At sea, the EU border agency, Frontext, patrols. At is disposal is a
growing arsenal of high-tech gear and a fleet of high-speed boats. Also
on the water are racist vigilantes. Human Rights Watch documented eight
separate incidents in which “armed men in speed boats wearing black
clothes and ski masks” attacked and disabled boats full of migrants.

In December, the European Union announced a trebling
of spending on frontier defense and creation of a new 1,500-strong
force to respond to border emergencies. On offer to member states are:
helicopters, airplanes, offshore patrol vessels, coastal patrol vessels,
high-speed boats, off-road vehicles, motorcycles, night vision goggles,
long-distance day goggles, thermal cameras, CO2 detection devices,
motion sensors, digital fingerprinting, and enormous amounts of coiled
razor wire.

Frontiers Creep In

Policing borders is never as contained on the edge of the national
space as one might think. Aggressively policing borders means
aggressively policing immigrants; it means policing the entire
society according to the logic of the border. Border militarization has a
way of infusing internal politics with xenophobia and repression. The
vectors of this infection are police resources and political rhetoric.

Such speech justifies spot checks of dark-skinned people at train
stations and detention centers. Many of those who do land in the EU
territory find themselves effectively incarcerated. There are an
estimated 224 detention camps scattered across the European Union able
to hold more than 30,000 asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants. The
smallest of these hold a few dozen, the largest, more than 1,000. They
have emerged, like a previously sunken archipelago, as Europe’s
liberalism recedes.

Few regulatory standards govern these places; even the best are
usually ringed by razor wire, while the worst, such as those in Hungary,
are filthy, unheated, and infested with bedbugs. Guards have been
filmed throwing food into open pens of refugees. Ultimately, the total
number of refugees detained in Europe is unknown because most states do
not keep such statistics.

Outside of Rome, in a prison-like immigration detention center,
guards wear riot gear and security cameras watch all. In desperation,
detainees have rampaged and committed self-harm. In the state of North
Rhine-Westphalia at least six guards, at a privately operated,
for-profit refugee camp have been accused of abusing asylum-seekers.

To pay for such facilities, the Danish People’s Party has proposed
that the Danish government seize cash and jewelry from refugees. The
Nazis did the same to Jews headed for camps. The trade union of Danish
police, to their credit, has officially refused to implement such a
policy even if it becomes law.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble seems to view the biggest
migration crisis in Europe since World War II as an opportunity to
further pressure Alexis Tspiras and Syriza — Greece is in fact turning
into a giant, impoverished, holding pen for migrants. At the same time
Schäuble is using the crisis to advance his agenda of a German-centered
federal Europe. “We will have to spend a lot more funds for joint
European defense initiatives,” said the minister. “Ultimately our aim must be a joint European army.”

Choosing The Future, Now

The predominant response to the current refugee influx is having
deeply corrosive effects on democratic politics. First, there are
immediate opportunity costs: every detention center constructed, or SWAT
team trained, is something else that a society chose not to do.
Secondly, investment in repression, like other forms of investment,
determines future action. Too much investment in the repressive
apparatus of policing creates a “path dependent” momentum away from an
open society towards authoritarianism, and this shapes how societies
will respond to future crisis.

I saw clearly the distorting effects of over-investment in repression
when I covered the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans. Just after the storm, scores of towns near the impacted area
sent whatever they had. And what did they have after a generation-long
war on drugs? They had cops. Cops and surplus military gear like armored
personnel carriers, high-end assault rifles, and body armor.
They did not have well-trained civil defense teams, mobile
medical centers, sufficient search and rescue teams, mobile kitchens,
tents, cots, or diapers. Most of those cops who volunteered to go to New
Orleans wanted to help save people. But all they had were the means of
repression, so that is what they brought.
It would seem that Europe is at a turning point. The logic of
emergency must be rejected. Civil liberties and tolerance cannot be
sacrificed at the altar of security.

If it goes too far down the road toward the fortress, repression will
be the only response it is capable of when much larger climate
disruptions kick in. Carrying on with ever-rising greenhouse gas
emissions and continued state hardening guarantees that the
Schmidt/Agamben thesis will be unstoppable; then liberal democratic
Europe, with all its terrible flaws and hypocrisies, will seem like a
lost golden era.

The northern Italian region of Lombardy has passed regulations
forbidding access into hospitals and public buildings to anyone wearing
face-covering garments, such as the burqa and niqab; this is the first regional law to explicitly outlaw Islamic face coverings in Italy.

Lombardy Governor Roberto Maroni announced the new regulation for
access to regional structures, prompted in particular by the Northern
League after the November 13 jihadist attacks in Paris. The text makes
reference to national legislation already in place, which prohibits
people from going about in public dressed in a way that prevents facial
recognition without a “justifiable motive.”
The secretary of the Lombard League, Paul Grima, said that current
legislation is not respected or enforced, “as thousands of Muslim women
go about undisturbed with their faces completely covered by the burqa or
the niqab, making it impossible to identify them.”

The new regulation, which will take effect on January 1, 2016,
authorizes personnel to stop people from entering public buildings if
their faces are not clearly visible, and thus prohibits not only the
burqa, but also helmets and other headgear.

The Lombard Regional Council voted in the amended legislation unanimously,
which explicitly states that religious motives will no longer
constitute a justifiable motive for covering one’s face. “Religious
traditions or customs cannot represent just cause for an exemption
according to article 5 of Law 152/1975 regarding the demands of security
within regional buildings,” the regulations state.

“We have updated legislation and now those in charge of access will
stop anyone trying to enter with their faces covered,” Maroni said.

Simona Bordonali, head of Security, Civil Protection and Immigration in Lombardy, said that “serious terror attacks” in recent weeks had led the region to beef up its security measures.

“Whoever wants to enter a hospital in Lombardy or regional offices
must be recognizable and have an uncovered face,” she said. “The burqa
and the niqab, as well as ski masks and full-face helmets, are therefore
banned.”

In recent weeks, Italy has been praised for the effectiveness of its counterterrorism measures and put forward as a model for other European nations.

As part of its security, Italy routinely profiles suspects, deports
those considered a danger to the state, and jails those inciting
terrorist acts. It also benefits from decades of experience fighting
organized mafia crime within its borders, which parallels the actions of
terrorists in significant ways.